It wasn’t the blare of an alarm, nor the slivers of light creeping through the cracks that woke him. It was that faint gnawing in his stomach—his own private alarm, reminding him every morning that he was still alive... and still without food.

  Noah opened his eyes slowly. The ceiling above him wasn’t a white expanse, but a map of corroded ash, with long fissures dangling down like unhealed wounds, threatening to collapse over his head. A cold drop of water splashed beside him, a rhythmic tapping that had begun months ago, announcing the inability of both his hands and his pockets to mend the roof.

  In this room, the constriction wasn’t merely in the space, but in the hope itself. An iron bed groaned with every breath; a thin blanket with threads so aged they could no longer distinguish between the piercing cold of winter and the scorching heat of summer; and an old bag crouching in the corner. That bag summarized his life, for everything Noah owned could be carried in one hand, and taken away in a single minute.

  Noah sat up, pressing his hand over his stomach. He breathed deeply, trying to tame the small beast lurking in his intestines. He had learned through experience that hunger, if ignored, turns into a throbbing headache... and then, finally, into a dead silence.

  He moved to the kitchen with heavy steps. He opened the first cupboard—a whistling void. The second—a void mocking him. On the weary wooden table lay a single loaf, or what remained of it: half a stale loaf that had hardened as much as his days had. It was two nights old.

  He broke it with his hand, the sound of it cracking like a breaking bone. He paused for a moment, looked at the two unequal pieces, then pressed them back together tightly. He wouldn't eat now. Hunger in the evening is more savage, and he would need that weapon later.

  He settled for boiling water. No tea to color the cup, no coffee to chase away the sleepiness. Just hot water to deceive the stomach for a while, deluding it into thinking something had entered. He sat on the floor; the only chair had lost one of its legs, and the chair opposite... wasn't broken, it was missing entirely.

  That had been his mother’s place. She died of a simple illness, one where the price of the cure was a "handful of money." But money was a guest that never knew the way to this house. In her final days, she used to apologize to him; she apologized for her weakness, for her need, and for her imminent departure that would leave him alone. He never forgave her for that apology—not out of resentment, but out of grief, because she was apologizing for a fate she didn't choose.

  As for his father? He was merely a faceless name, a shadow without an echo. He was told the man had left before he ever saw the light, but Noah knew a deeper truth: survival requires courage... and that man chose flight over confrontation.

  He put on his shirt—its color so faded that it had long since lost its identity—and a pair of pants that clung to him too tightly, as if reminding him of his poverty with every movement. His shoes were another story entirely; a silent mouth held together by a plastic string, begging not to breathe its last on the pavement.

  He looked into the cracked piece of glass he called a mirror.

  A young man stared back at him—cheeks so hollow that shadows had settled within them, eyes so accustomed to breaking that fracture itself had become part of their gleam. He whispered bitterly,

  “Even hunger… doesn’t bother to shame you.”

  He stepped into the street.

  The neighborhood was a forgotten limb of the city’s body—piles of garbage, barefoot children chasing nothing, faces bowed so long they had forgotten the color of the sky. As he passed the bakery, the scent of fresh bread struck him like a slap he couldn’t block. He swallowed his dry saliva and turned his face away quickly. Standing there was a luxury he couldn’t afford—one that might push him into an act that would murder what little dignity he had left.

  He thought of Leila, his half-sister.

  The little girl who used to cry from hunger in his arms. He would give her his share and claim fullness with a pale, practiced smile. After their mother’s death, she was taken from him—not for lack of love, but for lack of food. Her father, a man wealthy and arrogant, had said coldly,

  “Poverty isn’t your fault—but it isn’t my problem.”

  Now Noah saw her only on rare occasions. And each time, she was cleaner, warmer… and farther from his soul.

  At the shop where he worked, Noah was always the first to arrive and the last to leave. He didn’t dream of promotion. He dreamed of the moment the owner threw out the “trash”—a swollen can of beans, bread with one rotten edge. Things unfit for sale, but good enough to keep Noah alive.

  At dusk, he returned to his room.

  He sat on the cold floor and took out the half-loaf of hardened bread. He ate slowly, chewing each piece as if it were a life-altering decision. He didn’t feel full—but he felt something else.

  He felt alive.

  He lay back on his bed, wrapped himself in his frayed blanket, hunger still whispering in his ear. Poverty was there. Despair was there. As for the future…

  It was entirely absent from the scene.

  He whispered softly before exhaustion claimed him,

  “Are some people born only to endure?”

  No answer came.

  Only silence.

  ---

  Noah wasn’t sure what motives had led his feet there. He carried no gift worthy of the place, no excuse to justify his appearance, not even a fragile hope that the meeting would brush the dust off his days. And yet, he found himself slipping in like a thief into that quiet neighborhood—the neighborhood whose sidewalks looked as though they had been washed with water and roses, where houses did not complain of weakness, and walls had never learned the meaning of decay.

  Everything there seemed complicit against him: the symmetry of the trees, the shine of luxury cars, even the air itself, light and refreshing, as if it had never passed over piles of garbage in his forgotten district. He stopped in front of the towering iron gate. He saw his distorted reflection on its polished paint and thought of turning back, but retreat would mean a final admission that he had lost even the right to try.

  He knocked.

  The door was not opened by the owner of the house, but by a pair of cold eyes belonging to a servant who didn’t ask for his name. A single glance at his faded shirt and shoes gasping their last breath was enough to classify him.

  “Wait here.”

  Waiting, for Noah, was home. He had spent his life waiting—waiting for his turn in line, waiting for a late bus, waiting for money that never came, and waiting to be treated like a human being.

  After an eternity of anticipation, Layla’s father appeared. There was no anger in his eyes, only humiliating coldness; he looked at Noah as if he were an oil stain on a precious carpet.

  “What do you want this time?”

  “I want to see her… just see her,” Noah said, his voice trembling under the man’s gaze, which lingered on the plastic string holding his shoe together.

  The man didn’t argue. He simply gave a detached nod. “One minute.”

  The door opened slightly, and Noah saw the paradise he had been denied. Layla was in the garden, standing between two girls her age. They laughed lightly, holding phones that gleamed under the sun like mirrors.

  Layla… was no longer the little girl who used to share half a loaf of bread with him. She wore soft clothes, and her neatly styled hair fell over her shoulders with a confidence he had never known in her.

  When her eyes fell on him, shock did not appear—what appeared was confusion. She stepped toward him unsteadily, glancing back at her two friends as if afraid her old secret might be exposed.

  “Noah… why did you come all of a sudden?” she whispered in a choked voice.

  “I missed you… I just wanted to see you.”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Layla fell silent and looked at her two friends, who were exchanging curious whispers. She lowered her voice even more until it became a rustle.

  “Now isn’t a good time… my father told you that visits should be organized.”

  The word itself wasn’t painful, but it was a knife tearing apart what little remained of blood ties. Organized—meaning his spontaneous presence was chaos, something that scarred the beauty of this neighborhood.

  She continued, stammering, “My friends are here… I don’t want any embarrassment.”

  She didn’t say it outright—you are embarrassing—but it rang in his ears with the clarity of a scream. Noah looked into her eyes and found them avoiding him, as if looking at his misery might contaminate her new world, or remind her of the scent of poverty she had escaped.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, as if searching for the old Layla behind this elegant mask.

  She nodded quickly, mechanically. “Yes, yes… I’m fine.”

  Then she added, in a tone devoid of concern, filled with a cruel observation:

  “You… look very tired.”

  He wanted to scream at her—to tell her about the shop, about the owner who exploits him

  , about the hunger that had become his only companion in bed. He wanted to tell her he was trying for her. But the words died on his lips; sad stories have no place in sunlit gardens.

  “It’s better if you don’t come without an appointment,” she said as she stepped back.

  “People here… ask too many questions.”

  He nodded slowly, as if bidding farewell to something that had just left his soul.

  “Understood.”

  A laugh rose from behind. Layla immediately turned back toward her world, and without a goodbye, the iron gate closed, leaving Noah alone before its bars.

  Noah did not feel broken; for breaking assumes the existence of something solid, and he had shattered long ago. What he felt instead was that he was excess to requirements—something that should be hidden under a rug or behind closed doors.

  He walked on until his strength was drained, then sat on an unfamiliar curb. From his pocket, he took out the piece of stale bread—the one he had thought he might share with her if it came to that. He stared at it for a long time. Layla no longer knew the taste of stale bread, and perhaps one day she would erase from her memory that she had ever tasted it at all.

  He returned the bread to his pocket. Hunger no longer gnawed at him; instead, a numbness spread through his body.

  With nightfall, he returned to his room. He took off his torn shoes, lay down on his iron bed—which groaned in sympathy—and fixed his gaze on the cracks in the ceiling.

  He thought of everything

  He closed his eyes. He asked nothing of God, and he did not blame fate. He had reached the most terrifying conviction of existence: that he was not a hero in a tragic story, but merely a typographical error in the book of life—

  a small, trivial, recurring error, whose erasure would not alter the essence of the story in the slightest.

  ---

  That night, Noah didn’t go to sleep—he slipped into a coma.

  He tried to close his eyes early, not because physical exhaustion had defeated him, but because his soul refused to remain awake any longer. He lay on his iron bed, his eyes suspended in emptiness, watching the darkness slowly swallow the familiar details of the room.

  He wasn’t thinking about anything specific—and that was the most dangerous kind of silence.

  The silence that precedes quiet collapses.

  Minutes passed… or perhaps hours. Time loses its compass in cold rooms.

  Then suddenly, he felt it.

  It wasn’t a sound breaking the stillness, nor a fleeting thought crossing his mind.

  It was a strange physical sensation, as if a small piece deep inside him had slipped out of its proper place.

  He felt his body—but as something foreign, as though the distance between his consciousness and his skin had widened by a few millimeters.

  He shifted slightly on the bed. The iron groaned beneath his weight, but the sound felt distant, as if it were coming from another room. He stopped moving and breathed slowly. The air in the room hadn’t changed, yet it grew dense—like a liquid gently, terrifyingly pressing against his chest.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, and a faint dizziness washed over him.

  Not the dizziness of hunger, but the kind that resembles the moment of nonexistence before a fall.

  Then, just as quickly as it had come, everything vanished.

  He opened his eyes immediately.

  The room was the same: stagnant darkness, a window that refused to open, dampness gnawing at the walls. He sat on the edge of the bed, placing a hand on his chest to feel his heartbeat. It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t erratic.

  It was steady. Monotonous. Stronger than it should be—like the ticking of a clock in an abandoned corridor.

  “Strange…” he muttered, in a voice he didn’t recognize—a voice stripped of echo.

  He lay back down, trying to convince himself that what had happened was nothing more than the residue of exhaustion, or the aftermath of a day poisoned by disappointment. But one truth imposed itself, impossible to ignore:

  For the first time in years, he did not feel the familiar weight pressing down on his chest.

  It wasn’t lightness. It wasn’t relief.

  It was emptiness.

  As if the part of him that had felt humiliated by the shop owner, ashamed, and broken in front of Layla… had detached itself and left.

  Noah was now a body without emotional weight.

  Sleep finally claimed him, while that subtle sense of slipping still lingered.

  He fell asleep thinking about work tomorrow. He didn’t want to go—but the thought quickly faded away.

  Noah’s world was not as simple as it might appear to an observer from afar.

  Yes, the streets were the same—crowded and noisy. The cities were the same, with their towering walls. Poverty was the same relentless mill, slowly grinding bones and turning dreams into flour that fed no one.

  But beneath this familiar surface lay a darker truth—one that everyone avoided touching in their long conversations.

  “The Summoning.”

  For years, this phenomenon had been gnawing at the fabric of reality. It was never recorded as a catastrophe in history books, nor as a war declared by any nation. Instead, it began as an unsettling silence—one that kept expanding. Someone vanished from their bed at night. Another disappeared while tying their shoes in a deserted alley. They would be gone for days… and then—some of them returned.

  People called it the Summoning, a name heavy with the authority of the unknown.

  There was no law governing selection. Money offered no protection. Virtue granted no salvation. Strength provided no immunity. The Summoning was as random as death—or perhaps so precise that it surpassed the limits of human comprehension.

  But the true terror was not in the disappearance.

  It was in the return.

  Those who were fortunate enough to survive never came back the same. They returned carrying abilities: speed that made time slow down, sharpened senses that pierced through walls, and physical strength that anatomy books could not explain. Powers that turned ordinary humans into supernatural entities.

  Governments tried to impose control. They registered the returnees, documented them, and passed laws to restrain them—but it was like trying to bind the wind with a piece of cloth. Over time, the balance of the world tilted. New masters emerged—humans who possessed what others did not. Some sold their power to governments. Some built private empires from the shadows. Others simply withdrew from a world that no longer had room for their existence.

  But the price was unbearable—a cost paid in blood and oblivion.

  Out of every hundred people who were summoned, only five or six survived.

  The rest?

  No bodies to bury.

  No stories to tell.

  No farewells to hold.

  They were simply erased from existence, as if they had never been.

  The survivors spoke very little, and the little that slipped from their tongues was enough to plant terror in the hearts of all who listened. They spoke of “another world”, of merciless trials and laws that did not recognize tears. Death there was not a mercy—it was a final ending.

  Because of this, people did not wish for the Summoning; they trembled at the very thought of it. When someone disappeared, their family did not open their doors for mourning right away. Instead, they waited… one day, two days, a week… staring at the door, hoping for the return of the summoned with a new ability, or dreading the despair that would confirm their child had become nothing more than a number on the list of the erased.

  Noah knew all of this.

  He had heard the stories of the summoned in the aisles of the store, in the whispered conversations on worn-out buses, and had seen their feats on screens that broadcast their victories without sound. Yet he had never felt that any of it concerned him. He believed the Summoning was meant for important people—for those who possessed a hunger for life, or who had something they feared losing.

  As for him… he was already living in a state of nothingness. He could barely see himself in the mirror, so how could that mysterious world possibly see him?

  That night, the silence in Noah’s room was not merely the absence of sound. It was a dense substance, like ink coating a page before the first words are written. He lay on his bed, its joints eaten away by rust, and found himself recalling the absent face of an old neighbor—a man who used to gather firewood and scraps of plastic to survive, before disappearing into a temporal rift for seven days. When he returned, he came back not only with full pockets, but with a presence the alleys of Dusk had never known. The man soon left, leaving behind nothing but legends—and a single idea that had taken root in young Noah’s mind at the time:

  “The world behind the curtain possesses a strange kind of justice… it takes everything from you, then gives you what you never dared to dream of.”

  But Noah, now, was not searching for justice.

  He was searching for release—from thinking itself.

  Outside, the neighborhood began to lose its meager lights.

  The cold wind started tapping against his cracked window, as if trying to warn him of something. And suddenly—at that fragile moment just before deep sleep—Noah felt the weight of his body begin to fade.

  It wasn’t the familiar dizziness.

  It was the sensation that the ground no longer existed beneath the bed.

  The room began to drift away…

  The cracks in the ceiling widened, turning into black holes that swallowed light, color, and sound.

  …Everything started to melt, like a watercolor painting under rain.

  That night, while the world was preparing for a new day, Noah was slipping completely out of this world. He did not realize that his “lack of importance” was precisely what made him the perfect candidate for something humanity had never witnessed before.

  “I wish I would just disappear…”

  Noah whispered the words as he fell into a deep sleep.

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